Sorry to hear about your tough exam experience. We have all been there! (I myself notched a 3 on an AP exam after thinking I had completed the first section and letting time run out. When I discovered my error, a page of untouched essay problems, I rushed through the rest of the test. So it goes.) I guess I would start by asking where those practice scores had come from, as they are exceptionally high. If, for example, they were from Practice Test 1 and Practice Test 2 through mba.com, then were those first attempts, or had you retaken them? If the latter, then you might have gotten an artificially adjusted score, particularly if you had retaken the exams too quickly after the first run-through. The importance of calming test-day nerves cannot be glossed over either. One person I know who earned a verified perfect Q51 V51 wrote an article on more than one GMAT™ forum in which he talked about meditation. Whatever it takes to hit the sweet spot of feeling pressure yet focusing on the problem at hand!
If you took the test, then you ought to look into the data on the Enhanced Score Report (ESR), provided you paid the extra fee for it. If you did not order one, then you should. You will be able to tell in which areas you tended to miss more questions, as well as on what portions of each section you tended to flounder (beginning, middle, or end). If, for instance, you missed more questions in the first set of ten, perhaps due to nerves, then you would have been climbing out of a ditch for the remainder of the test. Based on assays (not essays) I have read about through GMAT Club, it would appear as if those first ten questions really do carry more weight than the others (despite claims to the contrary in the OG).
To offer my two cents on how you can structure your study approach to the retake, I would look into any official products you have not touched for access to different official questions. Looking at the same ones again may give you a false sense of security, and you do not want to get another gut shot after an additional investment of time and energy. Did you exhaust the questions of both the Verbal Guide and Quantitative Guide? What about Practice Exams 3-4, or 5-6? There are plenty of options for official materials that mba.com wants to sell you.
Although you might feel massively disappointed in the Q46, I suspect that a little extra practice, combined with a thorough tracking of your mistakes and time taken per question, will help shore up problems there. The bigger concern to my eyes is the V35. To hit the 45 from your first practice, you probably missed just three or four questions. To go from that to a 35 is somewhat surprising. I wonder, did you decide to do Quant first, hit a snag there, and then allow that to spill over into Verbal? In any case, a review of the types of questions you miss more frequently can help to get that score back up again. You should rank the types of Verbal questions (e.g., CR, RC, SC) in order of difficulty so that you can target specific areas that give you more trouble. By doing so, you increase the probability of hitting the high notes on test day.
If you plateau at some point in your course of study, then it might be time to seek outside assistance, either from a high-scoring friend or a qualified tutor or teacher.
All the best.
Andrew
